Game changers: New paradigms for future of electronic product realization

The Cadence Executive Forum, titled, ‘Game Changers: New Paradigms for the Future of Electronic Product Realization’, was held this evening in Bangalore, India. The speakers were Lip-Bu Tan, president and CEO, Cadence, and Bhaskar Pramanik, chairman of Microsoft India.

In the opening address, Tan remarked that there is likely to be challenging next 12 months in the USA and Europe. It may also impact the Asia Pacific region. However, from an EDA perspective, there will be new design, as companies would be involved in designing next-generation products and killer applications. There will also be more consolidation, which will continue. Another trend is that the number of start-ups has dropped.

There are two main drivers — technology and market. The cloud is starting to present a big opportunity. Other key areas include green technology and power management. Video will be driving a lot of traffic. The impact on the electronics industry will be new product development, with the IP having expanded beyond processor cores, an increase in collaborations and a changing EDA landscape — Cadence is investing on its decision to deliver the on the EDA360 vision.

Some of the recent highlights include Cadence’s new software development suite that addresses the hardware-software design gap, expansion of the Palladium XP, and releasing the industry’s first DDR4 solution, which includes controller, soft and hard PHY, drivers, verfication IP (VIP) memory models and signal integrity reference designs.

He spoke about horizontal collaborations such as app programing interface, and vertical collaborations, which creates differentiation in the end markets. It also engages foundries in EDA, IP, etc. As an example, Tan spoke of Spreadtrum achieving one-pass silicon realization for the first 40nm product. Some other examples include Samsung designing and implementing 20nm product, ARM and Cadence collaborating on GHz implementation of Cortex-A15, and ARM, TSMC and Cadence collaborating on the industry’s first 20nm Cortex-A15.

According to him, computers will adapt to us. They will enable computing interfaces that are far more easier to use. The key business requirement is to balance the user expectations with the enterprise requirements.